Formal Verification of the Context Model - Enhanced Context Spaces Theory Approach

Pervasive computing is a paradigm that focuses on availability and non-intrusive integration of computing services into everyday life. Context awareness is the basic principle of pervasive computing. The important part of high-level context awareness is situation awareness – the ability to detect and reason about the real-life situations. The specifications of situations are often carried out manually by the experts. Therefore, the specification errors can be introduced. The specification errors cause the situation reasoning problems and context model inconsistency. In this article we propose and analyze the approach for formal verification of the situation definitions. Our solution uses as an input the situation specification in terms of low-level context features and the properties under verification, and then either formally proves that the specifications do comply with the expected property, or provide all possible counterexamples – the context conditions that will lead to situation awareness inconsistency. Evaluation and the complexity analysis of the proposed approach are also discussed.